On show days, after soundcheck but before he goes to shake hands and chitchat with the local radio station representatives and their friends, the young country star Zach Top puts on his superhero costume.
One Thursday night early this month in Camden, N.J., where he was opening for Dierks Bentley, that meant a colorfully patterned pearl-snap shirt tucked into crisp, airtight, dark-blue boot cut jeans. Dark-brown ostrich cowboy boots. An appetizer-plate-size belt buckle honoring his performance at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in March, where he played to 70,000 people. A white cowboy hat that added three inches to his already towering 6-foot-2 frame.
Earlier that afternoon, he was on his tour bus in regular-fit, breathable jeans and a Seattle Mariners popover, talking about the theater of stardom.
“Nowadays, there’s less of a pressure on having a big stage get-up,” he said affably. “I’m by no means trying to knock anybody with this comment, but there’s something about me that’s always like, man, if people are paying to come see me, I’m gonna show up looking like a star.”
Indeed, in a sea of male country performers who often appear to be dressing for a lakeside barbecue, Top, 27, stands out for his fastidiousness. His outfits recall the titanic neo-traditionalist country stars of the early ’90s — Garth Brooks, Clint Black, George Strait, Alan Jackson. And Top’s music is equally faithful. He’s a neo-neo-traditionalist, bringing back the cheek, suavity and rowdy reverence of that era. It’s perhaps the beginning of an inevitable corrective following two decades of Nashville flirtations with hip-hop and pop.
“Cold Beer & Country Music,” Top’s first full-length country album, was released last year, spawning a pair of hits that capture the scope of his endeavor. “Sounds Like the Radio” is early ’90s manna, with its zesty pedal steel and statement of purpose opening line: “Well, the day I was born, the doc couldn’t believe / I came out cryin’ ‘Chattahoochee’” — tipping his hat to the title of the 1993 Jackson megahit. That was followed by “I Never Lie,” which sounds like George Strait doing stand-up, with its deadpan chorus about the joys of moving on from a bad thing.
“There was never any calculated decision to be like, Hey, you know what? It’s the ’90s thing. It’s just, when I write and sing and play, this is what comes out of me,” Top said of that generation of artists, who were at times derisively lumped together as “hat acts.” Top’s Springer Spaniel, Otis, was mischievously scamping about, jumping onto all of the available surfaces.
“I’m obviously very heavily influenced by that stuff, but in all my time being a student of the music and digging back, I went way further back from the ’90s, you know,” he added. “It was Merle, George Jones, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, back to the ’40s and ’50s.”
Top’s follow-up, “Ain’t in It for My Health,” due Friday, draws from that same deep well. An air of melancholy hovers over the album, with a suite of songs — “Splitsville, “Between the Ditches,” “Flip–Flop,” “Livin’ a Lie,” “South of Sanity,” “Lovin’ the Wrong Things” — that tackle the roller-coaster early whiffs of fame and the sadness of the collapse of a relationship with viciously sad balladry and witty wordplay. Top’s commitment to form remains immaculate: a high-wire routine so aesthetically faithful and brimming with theatrical mirth that he’s almost winking, merging a sense of history and a sense of play.
While he isn’t a pure cowboy, Top grew up cowboy-adjacent. The third of four siblings, he was raised in southeast Washington state, home-schooled through sophomore year of high school while doing chores on the family farm. He took guitar lessons with a local teacher who taught him and his siblings bluegrass, and the family formed a bluegrass group that traveled the country to festivals. Much of Top’s current touring lineup is drawn from musicians he met out at family-band events.
He took to Strait early, falling for his sly authority and gentlemanly presentation. Later, he gravitated to the rowdy power-cowboy style of Jackson and Brooks & Dunn. And he was enthralled by Keith Whitley, who started in the bluegrass world and moved on to become one of mainstream country’s true sad romantics. (Despite the proximity of the two scenes, the bluegrass world has produced only a few mainstream country stars in recent decades, including Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Whitley, who died in 1989.)
In 2018, the beloved country journeyman Daryle Singletary died, and a few days later, Top posted a cover of his hit “Spilled Whiskey.” Calls and emails flooded in, including one from Carson Chamberlain, a producer who had been a bandleader for Whitley and also worked with Black and Jackson.
“It reminded me of a young Whitley,” Chamberlain said in an interview.
For the next couple of years, Top regularly flew to Nashville from Colorado, where he was then living, for sessions arranged by Chamberlain with like-minded songwriters, many who had been writing since that golden age, including Paul Overstreet and Tim Nichols. When Top was making his debut album, he had over 300 songs in the can.
When it came time to bring in session musicians for that album, Chamberlain tapped some of the same people Top grew up listening to.
“The first time I went in with those kind of guys, I was kind of just scared [expletive],” Top said. “Like, no, I’m not gonna tell Brent Mason that I think he should play something different. This dude played ‘Chattahoochee,’ he played ‘Summertime Blues.’” (Shadows of ’90s greatness fall all around Top; he’s managed by Michael Doyle, a son of Bob Doyle, who has managed Garth Brooks for decades.)
In 2021, Top signed a publishing deal. In 2023, he signed to a Nashville independent label, Leo33, and began trying to secure his shot at country radio the old-fashioned way: pressing flesh with program directors at stations across the country. “Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done,” Top said of the office visits and impromptu unplugged sessions that are the coin of that realm. That’s been the pathway for young country stars for decades, but virality has been upending Nashville, especially since the pandemic, when a new minigeneration of talent emerged online, and labels and radio stations scrambled to catch up.
Nevertheless, that old-fashioned legwork allowed “Sounds Like the Radio” to become the most-added song at radio the week of its release. “We always said having radio in the title of your first radio song never hurts either,” Top said and chuckled. Then “I Never Lie” became his first song to crack the Billboard Hot 100, hitting No. 24.
Last year Top was opening for Lainey Wilson, this year it’s been Bentley, on what is likely to be his last tour as a support act. Starting next month, he’ll be headlining venues that hold several thousand. But he remains a sonic and philosophical outlier in the country music industry. “I got a lot of respect for what Morgan Wallen does. It’s not my cup of tea musically, obviously, but it’s him,” Top said. “I can’t sing ‘Whiskey Glasses’ and have a hit on it. It’s not me.”
Bentley — who likened Top to Chris LeDoux, the rodeo champ turned country purist fave — was sitting in front of Top at the 2024 Country Music Association Awards, when Top lost best new artist to Megan Moroney.
“I told him, dude, you don’t want to win that award,” Bentley said. “The longer you can hold off on that stuff the better, ’cause people love pulling for the guy that nobody else has really been turned onto yet. Unfortunately for Zach, his time in that world is going away pretty quickly.”
As with all successful outliers, he’s being followed by a stream of hopeful imitators. “I don’t have to say it, but, you know, all at once, a lot of guys have mustaches and a lot of guys are wearing cowboy hats that wasn’t wearing them before,” Chamberlain said.
“I told Zach that the pitch sheets will start coming out ‘à la Zach Top,’” he continued. He recalled recently being told of a publisher who’d said, “‘Hey man, I just signed me a Zach Top.’ And I just laughed and said, ‘No, they didn’t.’”
Of his potential downstream impact, Top was diplomatic: “I feel very lucky, very fortunate to have landed on the front end of what feels like a big shift, a big turn in the genre.”
The frisky tension between Top’s fluency with country arcana and his big-tent flair for the dramatic is hard to replicate, though. His bluegrass roots peek out throughout his albums — he plays all the acoustic guitar on them — and sometimes, the Rolex he occasionally wears on his right wrist peeks out, too.
“You have to kind of assume a bit of a character,” Bentley said. “Not just for your own ego, but for these people. They don’t want you to be Mr. Humble.”
Bentley added with a laugh, “He dresses the way my dad always wished I dressed.” (To wit, Top recently entered into a clothing collaboration with Kimes Ranch, a Western-wear brand.)
Top’s rapid rise hasn’t been without stumbles. Asked about his biggest mistake, he replied, “You listen to ‘Use Me’ and figure that out.” That song, about an illicit one-night assignation, is one of the most affectingly dour on his debut.
Top was married in 2020, and then divorced last year. “I [expletive] some big stuff up, made a good mess,” he said. “I was always just kinda like, yeah, yeah, I know. It happens to everybody. That [expletive] ain’t gonna happen to me.” Top sighed. “And yeah, sure enough, it snuck right up on me.”
The allures and complexities of fame claimed Top very rapidly. “Most of the time I couldn’t be happier getting to do what I do every day, but yeah,” he continued. “It brought a lot more complication to, whatever it is. Money or, all of a sudden, women wanting you. It brings a lot more complication. And so, I don’t know, I think that raises some more questions about just what exactly am I doing all this for, other than, you know, my love of the music.”
He took a pause, then mused, “Every now and then it takes a while to fall asleep, and you start thinking about, the hell am I doing?”
What Top is for certain doing is forming a complete circle to his influences, finding common musical cause with them and succor in their appreciation.
He’s done some songwriting with Gill. This year, he opened four shows on Jackson’s farewell tour. Last year he was invited to play in Strait’s annual charity golf tournament — he brought his father as his partner — and then took the stage for a short performance with Strait’s backing band.
“That was cool enough,” Top said. But as he got offstage and began putting his guitar away, Strait interrupted him, and let Top know just how enamored he was of his sound: “He was like, ‘Hey, keep that thing out. You wanna come up and play a couple with us?’”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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